Stock Tank Mixing
The Spring 2014 Stock Tank Mixing team is beginning re-design and testing of a stock tank solution mixer.
The primary goal of the Fall 2013 team was to design a centrifugal pump to mix stock solutions, with test designs utilizing a rotating arm that employed the pressure gradient due to rotation to bring dense solution located at the bottom of the tank to the top. End-of-semester tests showed high pump inefficiency due to large amounts of wasted input power due to drag on the rotating arm. The test results have prompted entire mixing redesign by the Spring 2014 team.
Two main designs were fabricated and tested on the small scale: a shallow bucket with small holes in the bottom and a plate (each attached to a handle) that were pumped up and down in the stock tank. The bucket design was meant to physically bring dense solution located at the bottom of the tank to the top of the tank while the plate design created turbulence and jets to encourage mixing. Both designs achieved full mixing with the same number of pump cycles, but the plate design requires less time because when the plate reaches the surface height, it is immediately plunged back down to the bottom of the tank. The bucket design, meanwhile, requires waiting for the fluid to drain out before being plunged back to the bottom. Full-scale designs will be based on the plate mixer.
Another design tested to decrease required input injected water into the bottom of the dense solution in the stock tank. Tests showed water injection was incredibly effective in mixing the majority of the stock solution, and any additional required mixing could be easily achieved by utilizing the plate mixer.
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